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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Daenerys • Tyrion

Dany supervises post battle clean up, which involves little girls dutifully retrieving arrows from dead corpses. Khal Drogo had just conquered two other khalasars, and his men are happily pillaging and raping. Their victims are a peaceful agricultural village who are literally called "lambs." Drogo will sell all his captives into slavery, where healthy young boys and girls will fetch a handsome price. I assume this is where Varys makes his orders -- the Meereen version of Amazon.com, where he can get free super saver shipping on orders of 50 or more "little birds." Dany chooses this exact moment to start a women's rights movement, stopping several rapes. Drogo supports her, telling his riders to "find other lamb women" instead of raping the ones Dany chose to protect. Great job Dany, you "protected" a dozen women while several thousand others continue to be raped.

One of the former rape-ees is this woman from Asshai (yes, that's the actual name of the place, haha) who wants to help by treating Drogo's wound. The bloodriders don't trust her, but Dany does. Mirri Maz Duur was being raped, her people were being murdered, and she's some sort of demon sorceress, but other than those things, what's not to trust? The most damning evidence against MMD is that Martin spends far too many words talking about her for it to be a normal healing. Dany has experienced so much hardship and despair yet somehow remains far too trusting and innocent.

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Tywin decided to put Tyrion in the vanguard of the attack, which can be interpreted as a big honor or even bigger insult. Tyrion doesn't seem very pleased that he wasn't given command -- Tywin put GREGOR in charge. Did Tyrion expect to be the leader or something? Will men even follow him into battle? Also, if you want to survive a war, there's no easier way than to be the tiny dwarf who fights next to the largest guy out there. Despite this, Tyrion storms off, upset at his social status among Tywin's inner circle. Meanwhile, he has more important things to do, like entertain the whore that Bronn found. Her name was Shae, and she was a good actress. Tyrion "suspected" that her delight during sex was faked. Come on now, Tyrion -- you're supposed to be cunning and intelligent. I'd put the percentage chance of Shae faking an orgasm with the "Giant of Lannister" at roughly 800%.

The next day's battle came early. I like the way Martin writes his battles -- POV really makes it seem quite personal and less like the scientific "200 men move left" type of sterilized storytelling. Tyrion actually does decently in the battle, holding his own with the help of some luck. Half his barbarians died, but I doubt Tyrion cares very much. The important thing is that he (and Bronn) survived the battle. Afterwards, it turns out Tywin counted on Tyrion and his men breaking, so even in victory, Tyrion disappoints his father. The battle on the whole was a huge success, but it seems Robb wasn't there and is making for Riverrun instead. I'm not going to pretend I understand all the tactics and who has what army and where, but I assume Tywin thought he was engaging the entire Stark army but only part of it was here, so the Lannisters fell for some sort of fake out.

30 comments:

Yup, Roose Bolton came down with the Stark footsoldiers to keep Tywin in the east and pin him on the river, whilst Robb marched west from the Twins with his cavalry to relieve Riverrun. It's a big fake-out as it means that instead of inflicting a crushing defeat on Robb, Tywin's fallen for their tricks and is now far too far away to send aid to Riverrun.

Effectively, Tywin just got pwned by a 14-year-old boy, which Tyrin, dutiful son that he is, finds hilarious :-)

Indeed. Tywin had hoped that Robb would take his whole force into battle with his army, that Tyrion's mountain clans would rout, and that Robb (an unseasoned boy) would rush into the gap, allowing the rest of Tywin's forces to close in around him and obliterate him.

Instead, Robb split his forces onto either side of the Trident, giving Roose Bolton the command of the footmen that marched South to tie up Tywin's army while Robb takes his cavalry, crosses the Trident at the Twins (that was the point of the marraige pact drawn with Walder Frey), and races to Riverrun, which is besieged by an army led by Jaime.

So while Tywin scored a solid victory over Bolton's footmen, the army is still intact, while Robb rides Southwest to Riverrun with the goal of lifting the siege.

This is where the book really gets fun. I envy everyone I encounter that is reading it for the first time - there's so much going on.

Much of the Stark shenanigans are what you missed in the last Catelyn chapter with all that 'lots of names and other stuff' was happening. GRRM likes to hide important info in those boring stretches of descriptions of feasts or clothes or banners or lordly issue, etc. Sometimes its worth it to overcome the intense boredom and slog through that stuff.

Also, haha, I never even read it as Ass-hai, it was always Ash-ai in my head (one 's' silent). Can't believe I never noticed that.

That's some good reading and writing there; noticing that GRRM used too many words on MMD for her to be some ordinary character.

GRRM's way of writing battles is more personalised and thus entertaining in its own way, but it does leave the reader unable to grasp what's happening on the strategic level = who's fighting who, what happened and who won (sometimes).

You could say that the confusion sorta mirrors warfare in real life, especially warfare w/o gunpowder though

Yes, but on the other hand, how many people do you know who have to concentrate enough to write all of this on each chapter as opposed to reading it all as quickly as possible to find out what happens next?

The whole reason Roose Bolton was picked for the command of the force fighting Tywinn is because he is an extremely cautious and deliberate operator. He was probably the perfect choice to run the attack 'just so' to the point where it would seem like a serious battle, but in fact be a feint.

Rob needed someone who would not get overzealous and try to win glory, but would make the feint and then draw back and save his forces for the next fight.

This post confirms my suspicion that "Jason" has read the series before and this blog is some sort of experiment or joke. There's no way anyone gets both Varys' little birds and sees the MMD thing coming this early their first time reading AGoT.

also he's gotten a lot of the stuff wrong. screen this comment -- but right now he still thinks jaime and cersei sent the assassin to kill bran, he's completely missed the lyanna stuff, and he loves walder frey. who could in their right mind love walder frey if they read the series before? who would completely ignore jon's parentage without even mentioning it? either the blog is real or its a very convincing fake.

When I read AFFC, I decided to take it slow and do a "As I Read" thread on an asoiaf forum at the same time, and I noticed that I was picking up more things because I was reading more slowly and taking time to actually think about things instead of plowing through as fast as I could. There's no conspiracy here, people.

i know tyrions chapters are fun to read, but this makes it even more obvious to me that hes a whiney sod. Seriously, he makes out through this whole book that his dads mean to him and what does he do once Tywin invites him to his war council? make japes and drink wine. nice one

Yeah BlogMeister, I was starting to wonder if our faithful blogger is feeling okay after reading the next few chapters. This is the part of the book where I'd abandoned my job, my wife, and my kids and couldn't stop reading.

It was unquestionably the event that made me realize that Martin was something special and was taking no prisoners. Literally. I always considered the man in question to be the protagonist of the story . . . I guess not. From that point onwards, the suspense ratcheted up a hundredfold for me.